London Holiday

By Michelle L. Levigne

It started with an overnight stay at Divine’s Emporium and a high school computer programming assignment. Athena found an unusual video camera, hooked it up to her computer, and videotaped her cousin, London, whom everyone called Doni. She thought nothing of it, after all the other odd events of that night.

After all, Neighborlee, Ohio was the weirdness capital of the United States, and Divine’s Emporium was the caretaker, the way to control all that weirdness and keep the magic tamed. At least, that was what everyone who saw the strange things and people and events chose to believe.

Three years later, in an experimental computer class in college, Athena and her teammates chose to create a social media site as their project. The site, called FlopDrop, needed a hostess. Doni agreed to be the foundation for all the images of the hostess, whom they named London Holiday.

To the surprise of the team and the class--and the disgust of their rivals and enemies--FlopDrop took off. London Holiday and her CGI friends became overnight Internet sensations. London seemed to take on a life of her own.
By the time Athena and Doni realized that their artificial person had become a self-aware Artificial Intelligence, they weren’t quite sure what that harmless experimentation three years ago had created. Were they midwives at the birth of a new lifeform…or repeating Dr. Frankenstein’s mistakes on an even bigger scale?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uncial Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781601741967

Michelle L. Levigne

On the road to publication, Michelle fell into fandom in college, and has 40+ stories in various SF and fantasy universes. She has a BA in theater/English from Northwestern College and a MA focused on film and writing from Regent University. She has published 100+ books and novellas with multiple small presses, in science fiction and fantasy, YA, and sub-genres of romance. Her official launch into publishing came with winning first place in the Writers of the Future contest in 1990. She has been a finalist in the EPIC Awards competition multiple times, winning with Lorien in 2006 and The Meruk Episodes, I-V, in 2010. Her most recent claim to fame is being named a finalist in the SF category of the 2018 Realm Award competition, in conjunction with the Realm Makers convention. Her training includes the Institute for Children’s Literature; proofreading at an advertising agency; and working at a community newspaper. She is a tea snob and freelance edits for a living ([e-mail] for info/rates), but only enough to give her time to write. Her newest crime against the literary world is to be co-managing editor at Mt. Zion Ridge Press. Be afraid … be very afraid. www.Mlevigne.com www.michellelevigne.blogspot.com @MichelleLevigne

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http://www.uncialpress.com

Thanks for coming back to visit Neighborlee, Ohio!

Neighborlee was invented for a short story that eventually became one of the many adventures in the first full-length novel, Divine's Emporium. Later, I decided to have interdimensional refugee teens come to Neighborlee to hide and gather together. The Hunt series: Dawn Memories, Quartet, Butterfly, Finders Keepers, and Gathering.

I'm working on a series featuring Lanie Zephyr and her band of semi-pseudo-superheroes, and trying to unravel the mystery of where the Lost Boys came from, how they got to Neighborlee (and maybe Earth) and some rules of their half-baked powers.

The town just keeps growing. If you've met anybody in the various books whose stories you want to explore, let me know! Ideas? Requests?

Right now, I'm working on a story involving a team of SF geeks who get assigned to one dorm floor their freshman year at Willis-Brooks College...and find that their toys start becoming...real. Could be a lot of fun. Stay tuned for updates on the next Neighborlee, Ohio adventure.

www.MichelleLevigne.blogspot.com

www.Mlevigne.com

Chapter One

Before there was London Holiday, there was London Halliday.

The former...well, even after all this time, I still don't know what the right term is for her. As for the latter, she's more real and down-to-earth than anyone who has ever lived in Neighborlee, Ohio. Call her Doni, for one thing. Even for those of us who knew all the details, sometimes the similarity in names got confusing.

Where do I get the right to tell the story? First of all, I was there when London Holiday was born. In a sense, I was the midwife. Or one of them, anyway. Maybe using that analogy, Doni was as close to a mother as London Holiday would ever get. Anyway, Doni and I were cousins—our mothers were sisters. Her parents were killed in a mine explosion while they were researching a book, when she was nine. The Hallidays thought our family, the Longfellows, was just plain weird. From their point of view, weird was lower in rank than common, and if they had thought they could get any profit from Doni, we never would have known that Aunt Lenore and Uncle Thaddeus were dead.

(Yes, my family's name is Longfellow. Gonna make something of it?)

(And no, we're not related to the poet. Granddad was an orphan, one of the many orphans who, through the generations, arrived from seemingly nowhere on the outskirts of Neighborlee and got dumped in the Neighborlee Children's Home. He loved poetry, so he chose Longfellow when someone gave him the chance to choose his own last name.)

I can't really say the Hallidays dumped Doni on us when her parents were killed. That would imply some effort to make sure she ended up on our doorstep, which they most certainly did not.

It was a Wednesday morning, the first week of June. I was on my way to Neighborlee High School, where I was a sophomore. We only had two more days of classes before summer break, and I was running late, as usual. We had the Yearbook Staff thank-God-it's-over party to look forward to, and since Miss Lanie was our advisor, it was going to be good. I grabbed my backpack, jammed full of goodies to share with my seventh period study hall, and was looking over my shoulder as I headed for the door, yelling for Uncle Jinx to hurry up. He promised to drive me to school on his Harley on his way out of town. Jinx claimed he wanted to be as far away from Neighborlee as he could get when Senior Prank Night hit—the first Wednesday of June every year—so he wouldn't be blamed for whatever happened.

(Jinx got in major trouble with his prank, his senior year, and the general consensus in town was that most of the idiots in the years that followed got in trouble because they tried to top what he did. What did he do? I have yet to find out. Something having to do with a fishing hole in the Metroparks on the first Thursday of June, where there wasn't a hole on the first Tuesday of June that year. Nobody would admit much more than that, but I grew up hearing rumors of the military regularly sending people to study the progression of life trying to get a foothold in the sludge at the bottom.)

I wasn't looking when I stepped out onto the front porch and ran into Doni and her four pitiful little pieces of luggage. I stubbed my toe on her backpack full of books and jumped backwards, biting my tongue against a howl, because I was barefoot, with my sneakers in my other hand. I was planning on putting them on while I waited for Jinx to get his motorcycle.

Does Mrs. Longfellow live here? this skinny little kid with bottle bottom glasses half-whispered.

Yeah. Why you looking for her?

Hey, I was just a tenth-grader in a big hurry. So sue me for sloppy speaking.

I'm London, she whispered, and raked one hand through the flyaway halo of white-blond hair that stuck out from her head like dandelion fuzz.

Hi, London. Nice to meet you. I'm her granddaughter, Athena.

Okay, I have to confess right here that the penchant for weird names runs in my side of the family. Doni was named London because that was where she was born. I was named Athena because my flaky hippy-wannabe mother, Portia—who decided to go to a sperm bank when her biological clock went off instead of putting up with the mess of the dating scene—thought that would influence me to be wise.

She forgot that Athena was a goddess of war and, according to some of the stories, a real smart-alec with an attitude problem and a penchant for nasty jokes. Not a real good role model. Mom never figured that part out before she decided to dump me on Gram and join the Peace Corps when I was six—which was probably a good thing. The last I heard from her, she was running an orphanage among the former cannibals in Papua New Guinea. Somewhere along the way, she figured it was easier to be a mother to twenty kids than to one.

I never said logic ran in my family, either.

It took about three seconds for what Doni said to sink through my gotta-hurry-for-the-last-day-of-school panic. I could have an excuse. The fuzzy-headed, awkward kid standing in front of me was not the cute little girl in a Minnie Mouse costume in the frame on Gram's mantle. Aunt Lenore wasn't real big on photos. She wasn't real big on writing home, either.

You're London? Yeah, I know, really insightful, alert comment. My cousin, London? Lenore and Thad's daughter?

My first thought was to ask where her parents were, because obviously they weren't anywhere in sight. I liked Aunt Lenore and Uncle Thad, although I had never seen them face-to-face. They called whenever they were in the States, going from one investigative assignment to another, and sent pictures maybe once every twenty months or so. Usually those were pictures someone else took, because they had an aversion to cameras that weren't used for their research, and to any writing that didn't produce a book. They sent really cool presents, neat souvenirs from places no tourist ever visited, and books by the ton. All of us learned to read at least two languages besides English so we could make use of those books.

Well, at least I had the sense not to ask Doni where her folks were, and kept my mouth shut while my brain skidded through questions and possibilities and discarded most of them in the space of a few seconds. And I'm not bragging when I say that. Gram claims I got electrocuted by a computer when I was a baby, crawling all over Granddad's desk—probably from trying to teethe on the mouse cord—and I've had an affinity for the frustrating, fascinating gizmos ever since. Part of that affinity meant my brain wanted to process a dozen different tracks at the same time, searching for information. Unlike computers, I had a tendency to get sidetracked by anything that caught my attention. Call it ADHD if you want, but I always preferred calling it the Neighborlee Effect.

(See how distracted I just got, telling you about me, when this is Doni's story?)

Then Jinx roared up the driveway from the shed in the back, where he stored his motorcycle, and skidded to a stop in the gravel. He gunned the engine a few times, twisting the handlebars and gave me his, Yeah? So you were in a hurry, weren't you? look. I signaled for him to cut and he did. Jinx was always a lot more alert than most people gave him credit for. He only pretended to be off in another dimension to irritate people.

It's London. I pointed at her.

Jinx shrugged.

Aunt Lenore's London.

Jinx jumped off his motorcycle so fast he almost knocked it over and across the driveway. He was up on that front porch with such speed, the force of the wind from his movement made the screen door bang open and then shut again. He grabbed Doni by her shoulders and turned her around and out of the shadows of the porch.

Hey, sugar, he said, in a thick cornpone-and-molasses drawl that was totally fake. For some reason, he always talked like a good-old-boy to anyone under four feet tall. Don't ask why. Where's your folks?

That was so not the thing to say.

Doni's eyes welled up with tears and her lower lip trembled. She didn't burst into tears. Doni had never been a crier and certainly never a wailer or a sniveler. I didn't know that then. All I knew was that this kid who was my cousin had showed up on the porch without any warning, without any parents, and looked like she was going to burst into tears. I panicked.

Gram! I shouted, and grabbed hold of Doni's shoulder to drag her into the house.

I didn't get to school, and I ended up sharing my bag of treats with Doni—which turned out to be a good thing. She liked those particular candy bars, and candy at eight in the morning definitely helped her relax a little and open up and talk. My theory was, she figured that someone who would unload a whole gob of candy bars on her had to be a good friend.

Gram was happy to see her, even though Doni brought the news that Aunt Lenore and Uncle Thad had died—and more than four months before. The Hallidays couldn't be bothered to notify our family. Aunt Lenore's maiden name wasn't known to the foreign media, and the death of a do-gooder scholar who never caused any scandals to report didn't create much of a blip to the media in the U.S., either.

If the Hallidays had been able to find some means of profit from keeping Doni, we never would have known about her parents' deaths until Gram's birthday came with no phone call or card. Then Uncle Jinx would have started making calls and harassing people for answers. He was always the doer and the fixer in our family, the knight protector. After he got a good kick-start, of course. He would have gotten an answer from the Hallidays, though. Whether they wanted to actually give an answer or not.

Time to back up and give some history:

The Hallidays have always been and always will be greedy jerks. High society, wealthy-out-the-wazzoo greedy jerks. When Aunt Lenore and Uncle Thaddeus died, his family proved they also didn't know the right questions to ask. Or in their case, they didn't have the sense to employ underlings and errand runners who knew how to ask the right questions. The top page of the report from their shyster lawyers' investigation said that Doni had a meager (by Halliday standards) allowance to pay for school and living expenses, and no one could touch her trust fund until she was twenty-one.

The Hallidays knew—or thought they knew, anyway—how much Uncle Thad was worth, and how much of the share of the Halliday conglomerate belonged to him and would belong to Doni someday: a miserable five percent of the Halliday empire. Even if she did wear their name, they didn't care to try to get around her bad genetics to ensure that she grew up as a true Halliday—shallow, egocentric, living off of others, intimidating everyone into giving her everything she wanted, and fighting tooth and nail to live in the world's spotlight. Their mercenary little excuses for minds calculated that it wasn't worth their while to work for twelve years, indoctrinating Doni into their ways of doing things, while they waited for her to grow up and turn her trust fund over to them when she had access to it.

They didn't read the rest of the report. While Uncle Thad owned a small percent of the Halliday conglomerate, Aunt Lenore was worth about twenty times as much as him. He was an academic genius, writing social investigative tomes that took triple PhDs to understand, and she had the Midas touch when it came to investments. According to old family jokes, Aunt Lenore did it in her sleep. She also had that talent before computers and instant Internet access and online trading became possible and then popular. All of us Longfellows have had strange and useful talents. That was hers.

Since Thad and Lenore were that rare type of geniuses who actually had their feet on the ground, they set things up so everything was in Aunt Lenore's name. If his family ever learned just how much they were worth, it was a given they would put the old guilt trip, don't-you-owe-your-family-some-consideration pressure on Uncle Thad to hand things over while Aunt Lenore's back was turned. They proved what geniuses they were when they realized his family wouldn't even think to check what was in her name.

The Hallidays considered Aunt Lenore a gold-digger with no fashion sense, and ignored her. Uncle Thad was something of a black sheep in the Halliday clan—or would it be more accurate to call him the white sheep?—since he considered wealth a responsibility, to be used for the betterment of the world. That's what got him killed, actually, so maybe some of his relatives' scorn wasn't entirely off base.

The result of all their scorn for anything tainted with Longfellow blood was that Doni ended up on our doorstep because the Hallidays found no use for her. Since when does someone have to be of use to be considered part of the family and accepted? Maybe that was the way it was in other families, the big, rich, powerful, allegedly important ones. Just the fact that Doni was of our blood was enough reason to welcome her with open arms.

Gram fussed over Doni—she was the one who called her Doni, which the fuzzy-headed, exhausted, brave little critter seemed to like. My guess is that from the moment the family lawyer retrieved her from the authorities who had custody of her after the accident, she had been hearing London, spoken with tones of disapproval and command. Much later, when she had nightmares and talked in her sleep about those horrid months of hanging in limbo, I learned that no one had the sense to send her out of the room before they talked about what a burden and bother she was.

The rest of the morning was spent in getting Doni settled in the room next to mine, digging through the attic and the cellar for some furniture, getting her a long soak in the old-fashioned claw-foot tub with orange-scented bath salts, and then filling her up with a huge breakfast feast. Gram was just like Mrs. Zephyr, and believed in healing through lots of good cooking.

Doni was pretty silent the whole time we got her settled. Every once in a while, I looked over and saw her lip trembling a little, but she never cried, never whined, never said much of anything. She also never smiled, except when Gram hugged her and Uncle Jinx swore for three minutes straight after hearing how the Hallidays didn't even have the decency to deliver her—a nine-year-old—personally when they relinquished custody of her. They sent her by plane, alone, and then she figured out how to take a bus. I think the fact that someone got really cussing hot furious on her behalf, instead of talking about her like she was an inconvenient puppy, raised her self-esteem about fifty points.

After Doni's bath, Gram sent us to Divine's Emporium to do some shopping. She wanted Doni to decorate her new room to suit herself, and get more furniture than just a bed and a single chest of drawers and some shelves. Besides, wandering around Divine's would distract both of us while she and Uncle Jinx got to work on tying up all the legal details. Gram went to school with Mr. Carr of Carr, Cooper and Crenshaw, the big-wig law firm in town, so he was our family lawyer.

More important than getting Doni away from the house while Gram took care of serious business was introducing Doni to Angela, the owner of Divine's Emporium. If Angela liked her, then we knew Doni had a good future in Neighborlee. If there was something broken inside her, Angela would sense it first and get to work, and give us some clues about what to do to help her.

Granddad always said Angela was the heart of the town. I was always ready for another excuse to go to Divine's and look for treasures. Introducing Doni to one of my favorite places in town was just one more thing I could do to help her settle in and feel welcome. We had a line of credit at Divine's. There was always something new and wonderful to find there, and Gram never got mad when I brought home something. Other girls liked shoes and clothes and makeup—I liked the odd treasures and books and just digging in the back rooms and dreaming. Mostly dreaming that one of these days, a sleek new computer like no one had ever seen outside an electronics show would mysteriously appear on one of the shelves of Divine's Emporium, and I could bring it home for a song.

It also helped that I was good friends with Bethany Miller, whose family owned the best diner in a twenty-mile radius, and who happened to be Angela's goddaughter. That meant since Bethany almost grew up there, when she wasn't at her dad's place, I nearly grew up there, too.

You like books? I said, about the hundredth question I had asked since we took off across town on Uncle Jinx's ancient mopeds. The motors were quiet enough we could talk, and there was hardly any traffic because everybody was either in school or at work.

About then, I realized I had missed the Yearbook party. Not good. But on the plus side, I had missed a lot of boring end-of-the-year activities in my other classes. Some of our teachers actually thought it was smart to give us quizzes that didn't affect our grades at all—and they even thought that we didn't know it.

Love books. A little spark of interest lit Doni's eyes, and I nearly fell off my moped in shock.

Great. Angela has a huge book room. You can take anything you want. But show me what you pick, because we might already have it at home. Most of the rooms on the fourth floor are library.

Really? Doni put both feet down and the moped stopped short, whirring a little before the engine shut off. Her eyes were wide and she had color in her cheeks for the first time since her hot bath faded.

Yeah, really. Granddad lives in books. Gram was a librarian. That's how they met. He was stealing from the research section and she caught him. Wrestled him to the ground and would have beat him black and blue, but he asked her out to a movie and... Let Gram tell you. She tells it a lot better. Or wait until Granddad gets home from his fishing trip, and he'll tell you and act it out.

I love books. She pushed off with both feet and hit the control that got the moped's pitiful little motor humming again.

Yeah, I kind of guessed. Right about that point, pity for my long-misplaced cousin turned to active like. We had a couple things in common, besides being dumped on Gram by relatives who couldn't find any use for us.

"I had lots of books. Mom and Dad would get tons of books everywhere we went, and send them home. We added a new room on our house to hold all the books. They wouldn't let me keep any of them. They sold every last one." The growling little break in her voice when she said they gave me a good idea just how Doni felt about her Halliday relatives.

Okay, maybe it was crass and immature of me, but I liked her a little bit more, knowing she really despised them. It meant Doni was with us all the way, and she wouldn't be calling her Halliday relatives and begging them to take her out of this weird little hick town in Nowheresville, Ohio, any time soon.

Don't get me wrong. I despised them, too. Anybody who would take a kid's books away was the lowest of the low. It didn't occur to us until later that if the Hallidays sold all those books, and sold her folks' house, she should have gotten the money, which she didn't. But the anger put Doni more squarely with us and against them. And since I had so little in the way of family, I was a greedy kind of kid who wanted to hold onto the ones I had as tightly as I could.

Then I thought of something.

You know, Aunt Lenore used to send crates of books to Gram all the time. Chances are good a lot of them were duplicates of the books your folks sent home.

Doni stopped her moped again and stared at me, her face glowing, her eyes shining like crystals, full of tears. I liked that feeling, of knowing I had made her feel that good, given her that kind of hope. I decided right then, I was going to be Doni's protector, as well as the big sister Gram asked me to be.

At Divine's Emporium, Angela was waiting on the front step. She had a big bucket full of bubble solution and all sorts of wands and blower contraptions that looked like squirt guns with fans attached to them. She looked like she was just enjoying a quiet spell at the shop by goofing off, relaxing in the balmy weather.

I knew better. Angela had the pulse of the town, and there were times I was pretty sure she either could read minds, or she had hidden microphones in every house, so she knew when people had problems and were coming to see her.

She waved to us and blew an enormous bubble, about four feet wide, that shimmered in all sorts of shades of purple and green and blue. It spun as the warm morning breezes lifted it higher, and I saw all sorts of images and figures chasing around in those swirls of colors. There were at least three Angelas in that bubble, all of them blonde and elegant, but only one had the blue granny-style dress that she always wore. The second wore an elegant gold and emerald Renaissance-style gown. The third was in crimson, sort of a Regency-style high-waisted gown, like she usually wore for the Christmas decorating party she held every year.

As soon as I recognized those multiple images of her, they vanished and other pictures appeared in the bubble. Par for the course. I didn't mention it to Doni, on the off chance I was the only one who could see those images. The bubble rose up to the ornate gutters on the third floor, hooked onto a cornice, and popped. The most delicious smells of honeysuckle and newly mown grass and fresh bread showered down on us.

Doni stared for about five seconds, looking scared. Then she got that resolved look on her face I had seen her wear about five or six times already as she adjusted to her new situation. She pressed her lips flat, nodded once, her eyes half-closed, and I imagined her processing everything like a super-computer. Then she smiled at Angela.

I'm guessing from those eyes and the shape of your chin and nose, you're Athena's cousin, London, Angela said, rising from her porch step. I remember your mother. She loved this place, and I'm sure you will, too. Then she held out her arms and London stepped inside them and let Angela hug her.

That just proved how smart Doni was. And yes, how hurt she was, desperate and hungry for all the love anybody wanted to shower on her. Another good reason for taking her to Angela and Divine's ASAP.

Despite Neighborlee being such a